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A review by quirpele
Empire Antarctica: Ice, Silence, and Emperor Penguins by Gavin Francis
adventurous
slow-paced
1.0
I really enjoyed reading this book but I think that's mostly due to loving Antarctica and not due to any particular skill of the author.
There's a part (p120.) where Francis lists some northern mythologies about the sun and its disappearance over winter (Inuit, Celtic, Norse) and then exclaims "it was extraordinary to witness this and know that it had no mythology here, that the landscape had been invested with no significance. No indigenous human society had tried to explain it or integrate it into their cosmology."
With the amount of reading that Francis has done, it's extraordinary that it was too difficult for him to look into these indigenous mythologies before claiming that they don't exist or explain the sun's movements over the seasons. The Māori, for example, live at about the same latitude as the Celts did, and the sun (and explanations for the different lengths of days) are certainly a part of their mythology.
Overall impression is that the book was offensively Euro-centric, which is pretty impressive for a book about the southern continent.
There's a part (p120.) where Francis lists some northern mythologies about the sun and its disappearance over winter (Inuit, Celtic, Norse) and then exclaims "it was extraordinary to witness this and know that it had no mythology here, that the landscape had been invested with no significance. No indigenous human society had tried to explain it or integrate it into their cosmology."
With the amount of reading that Francis has done, it's extraordinary that it was too difficult for him to look into these indigenous mythologies before claiming that they don't exist or explain the sun's movements over the seasons. The Māori, for example, live at about the same latitude as the Celts did, and the sun (and explanations for the different lengths of days) are certainly a part of their mythology.
Overall impression is that the book was offensively Euro-centric, which is pretty impressive for a book about the southern continent.